Editorial: Five years, 4,000 deaths

Monday

Mar 24, 2008 at 12:01 AMMar 24, 2008 at 4:41 AM

Now that U.S. combat deaths in Iraq have hit another round number - 4,000, including four soldiers killed Sunday by a roadside bomb in Baghdad - maybe it will be easier for Americans to remember the death toll.

Now that U.S. combat deaths in Iraq have hit another round number - 4,000, including four soldiers killed Sunday by a roadside bomb in Baghdad - maybe it will be easier for Americans to remember the death toll.

A Pew Research Center poll released this month found that just 28 percent of Americans could guess that combat deaths totaled close to 4,000. That's down sharply from last August, when 54 percent knew the death toll was around 3,500. In every poll previous to the 2008 tally, about half knew how many U.S. soldiers had fallen.

Americans simply aren't paying attention to Iraq, nor are the U.S. media. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, the percentage of news stories about the war has declined over the past year from 15 percent to just 3 percent.

Some of this comes from war fatigue, on the part of the news media and on the part of readers and viewers. Other issues - an exciting presidential campaign, a faltering economy - have grabbed everyone's attention. And the Bush administration's insistence that all is going well, thanks to the "surge" commanded by Gen. David Petraeus, has given people license to turn their attention elsewhere.

The U.S. casualties this weekend, along with a barrage of mortar attacks on the Green Zone that left 13 Iraqis dead, should remind Americans that, five years after the invasion, there is still no peace and security in Iraq. Only the brave dare fly into Baghdad International Airport. Most Iraqis still have electricity no more than a few hours a day. Unemployment is rampant; working sewers are rare; oil production still hasn't reached pre-war levels.

It is important to understand the multiple causes of the reduced violence for which Petraeus' surge gets credit. More troops have certainly helped, particularly in Baghdad. U.S. troops are more knowledgeable about which tactics work and how to keep safe than their predecessors early in the war. Petraeus, unlike some of his predecessors, is committed to counter-insurgency techniques geared toward minimizing violence instead of inspiring it.

Those techniques include co-opting - or bribing - the enemy. Petraeus' greatest success has come from convincing Sunni leaders to form militias that have joined with U.S. troops to fight foreign insurgents. Petraeus is giving weapons to Iraqis who were shooting at Americans a few years ago. The New York Times reports that 91,000 Iraqis are getting weekly paychecks from U.S. taxpayers to serve in Sunni militias.

The other factor is the unilateral cease-fire declared last year by Moktada al-Sadr, the radical cleric allied with Iran whose Mahdi Army is the largest Shiite militia. Sadr recently extended the cease-fire for another six months, though there are indications he cannot fully control his fighters. In any event, the continuation of improved security in Shiite areas depends more on the mercurial Sadr - and whatever instructions he gets from Tehran - than on Petraeus.

The reduction in civilian casualties is, in part, also a testament to the civil war that was raging a year ago between Sunnis and Shiites. Formerly mixed neighborhoods have now been ethnically cleansed, so there is less blood being shed.

As Petraeus has noted, the political progress the surge was launched to encourage has been slow and inadequate. There's still no agreement to share oil revenue between Iraq's three sectors. Provincial elections were set a few weeks ago - then canceled. Iraqi security forces are nowhere near capable of taking over responsibility from U.S. troops.

Instead, we have created Sunni militias that may soon be strong enough to take on Shiite militias. In Northern Iraq, Kurdish military units continue to resist any integration into the Iraqi national forces. And the Shiite-dominated government shows little inclination to pursue the kind of unity required for the country to hold together after U.S. forces leave.

Americans need to pay more attention to Iraq because things could as easily get much worse as much better. And we need to demand more from the presidential candidates than we're getting from two Democrats promising to quickly withdraw and one Republican promising to stay indefinitely. They need to tell us how they will restore stability and what kind of Iraq the U.S. troops will leave behind.

Five years. Four thousand U.S. deaths. Over 29,000 wounded. More than $600 billion spent so far, with estimates ranging from $1 trillion to $3 trillion in spending still to come. Unless the media and American voters start paying closer attention - and demanding a new U.S. strategy - these numbers will only continue to grow.